Before the new year, Intuit upgraded its thousands of apps and employees to the NEW QuickBase. This upgrade included the apps we use to run the Intuit QuickBase business, many of which I access daily as a marketing manager on the team.

From one QuickBase user to another, this blog post is a summary of four new features that I quickly found valuable and now can’t imagine going back to the old way. Boost your team productivity immediately with these four tips.

1. Encourage users to open multiple apps at once and access them from the new Apps bar.

The new, blue Apps bar allows you to access and work in multiple QuickBase apps at the same time. Each open app appears as a tab on the bar, in the same way that Internet browsers allow you to keep multiple sites open and flip between sites quickly. You can add new apps directly from the Apps bar by clicking on the “+ New App” tab.

In addition, the QuickBase apps you open in one session will remain in the Apps bar until you close them out individually, so you can have immediate access to the apps you need on a regular basis, if you leave them in the bar.

My own Apps bar currently has a number of apps open that allow me to stay connected to the groups I collaborate with regularly. Here’s a sampling: QuickBase Marketing Team, QuickBase Program and Release Management Center, Biz Ops Project Tracker, and Design/Creative Review. One month ago, my Apps bar looked different due to other priorities. [see image below]

Image: NEW QuickBase – new Apps bar showing multiple apps open

How to use the Apps bar:

Sign in to the NEW QuickBase and click on more than one app from your My Apps home page. Each app will appear as a tab in the Apps bar. Click on each tab to access each app. If you don’t have more than one app, click on ‘+ New App’ to add a new app and experience how the Apps bar works.

2. Customize new Table Home Pages for different user roles.

Every table in every app now has a home page that app managers can customize for different user roles. Customized home pages enable users to access the information that’s most relevant to them, faster and more directly than before, through quick access to tables, featured reports, and new filtering options. These filtering options include collapsible lists of reports and an auto-filter search field.

Earlier this week, thanks to a table home page, it took me only two mouse clicks to determine whether I could run a new project concept through the QuickBase marketing team’s upcoming project review process. I clicked on the Design/Creative Review app name in my Apps bar, then on the Meetings table in the app. The Meetings table home page is a report showing the schedule of upcoming meetings and the number of projects ready for review at each meeting. I realized I was going to have to ask the team leaders if we could add another meeting to the schedule in order to get my project reviewed this week. [see image below]

Image: NEW QuickBase – New filters, search, and top of a report on a Table Home Page

How to customize a Table Home Page:

App managers can set up a table home page from the table’s settings. Click on a table icon, then on the “Settings” link on the table bar. Under the User Interface section, select the “Table home page” link.

To show all of your users the same view, select “The same view for everyone” option from the two selections at the top of the page. To show different views for different users, select the second option, “A view based on the user’s role.” In the View column dropdown, choose what report you want to show which users.

3. Organize and search reports.

If you’re a QuickBase app manager who amasses reports like I do (“we might need to reference that one for strategy planning next year…”), or simply has many different users working in your apps, you’ll love that now you can group your common (shared) reports in a way that makes the most sense for your business. You and your users can also use the new search function to quickly find the exact report you need.

And then there are the smaller delights. The NEW QuickBase remembers which reports a user accesses most recently and automatically saves them under a “Recent” reports category, such as the monthly revenue report I access regularly, which shows me revenue changes from various channels. In addition, for common (shared) reports, I can collapse report groups that aren’t relevant to me, which is a big help in apps that have many user groups. Last but not least, as a general user I can conduct a universal search for specific reports in a table by name, just by typing a word or more into the search bar at the top of the reports panel. [see image below]

App managers can organize common (shared) reports into groups by clicking on the Reports & Charts link on any table bar, and then clicking on the “Organize” link. You can create groups and drag and drop reports into the different groups.

Within any table, any user can click on the Reports & Charts link on the table bar to open the reports dropdown panel. On the leftmost side will be the user’s most recent reports. To search for a specific report, start typing its name into the search bar and the reports panel will locate it.

4. Highlight the ability to search for answers via the in-product, integrated help function.

Now you and your users can access all QuickBase Help resources, including Live Community, from one search field within QuickBase to arrive at the answer you need, faster. Type in a search topic and the new function will return all available resources with related answers, as I did with the topic “cross-app relationships” last week.

I needed to copy an app that linked to another app, and wanted to know whether the cross-app relationships would automatically break in the copy (they won’t). The search returned responses from QuickBase Online Help and Live Community, all relating to relationships. I ended up learning much more about relationships than I would have anticipated. [see image below]

If I had needed help custom to the apps I was working in, I could have opened the dropdown at the bottom of the help menu within an app (“Can’t find an answer? Ask an expert.”) to ask a question in the Community, submit a support ticket to the Intuit QuickBase Support Team, or email the manager of the app directly. But the help files got me the answer I needed quickly.

Log into QuickBase. To conduct a search in the help panel, click the ‘Help’ button in the top right corner of QuickBase. This button is available no matter which app, table, or page you’re on. Once you type your question or topic into the search field, the help panel will bring back results from all available resources.

Sign into QuickBase to explore each of the features above. What other features have you discovered in the NEW QuickBase that have boosted your team’s productivity?

I was hoping for something useful here perhaps something to reduce the level of discomfort this new version of Quickbase causes my team.

Unfortunately none of the suggestions are helpful at all.

Responses point by point:

1. The application bar is *almost* useless, I already had access to this functionality using browser tabs, which even the slowest-to-adopt browsers have had for at least 4 years (And of course the technology was originally made available more than 10 years ago) in addition, switching browser tabs is quick and easy and doesn’t require an agonizing wait of several seconds to switch, I can also switch tabs *while entering data* in case I need to refer to something in another table, which is something the app bar can’t do.

I could see this being used in some sort of limited, stripped down browser with no tabs, however most of the limited-use browsers you’re likely to see are mobile, and of course the application bar doesn’t translate well (nor should it) to the mobile interface.

The one and only one use I have for this particular feature is that I can close out one device and switch to another one and have it remember which tabs I had open. Which is infrequently mildly useful.

2. This feature already existed in the old Quickbase, there’s nothing new about it and as far as I can tell, it’s use remains the exact same, however it’s less *used* because now you rarely see the application’s home page (Since the app bar remembers your last view and shows you that instead. This is a feature which existed and was made very slightly worse in the new Quickbase.

3. This would be useful…. If it wasn’t up to the application manager to decide what was “common” Each user will have their own set of commonly accessed views, because every individual has a different job and a different way of doing that job, as is it just means the application manager has to field a bunch of contradictory requests about what should and shouldn’t be “easy to get to” (When in the old version everything was equally “easy to get to” and you could group things near the top simply by naming reports alphabetically) If this was per-user instead of application wide, this would make up for some of the shortcomings of the new interface.

4. While the new help functionality is better than the old one, this is useful only for new application managers, not for already-competent application administrators, nor for the users who aren’t building applications at all.. While a good feature, it does *not* in anyway “boost team productivity” It might “Speed application building” (Which is a decent goal, but not the title of this article)

We’re sorry you’re unsatisfied with the changes made to the New QuickBase. The product management and design teams did extensive user testing of this new design for almost a year prior to release to ensure that the new QuickBase delighted new QuickBase users while addressing many of the problems we had heard about from our existing users. In test after test this new design was chosen as preferable, to new and existing users alike. And for features that didn’t test well, we went back to the drawing board, changed the design, and tested again until it was preferred.

But that doesn’t mean we got everything right for everybody. QuickBase app builders and users are a remarkably diverse group. Clearly for you, there are elements of the new design that have caused you and your team discomfort. That’s why we are still listening. Since releasing the new design we have incorporated a number of changes based on feedback from longstanding QuickBase app managers and end users. This includes better reports management, more vertical space with personalized spacing settings, and more customization options for the table home pages. We will continue to monitor feedback from users like you and continue to improve the experience of using QuickBase for everyone.

One last point… I think you may have missed Farah’s point about the table home pages. This feature was never available in the previous version of QuickBase, which had no notion of going to a page when the table name was clicked. In the New QuickBase, a table home page is what is displayed when you click on an individual table name. When you do, you see a list of the table records based on a default report view or any report the app manager decides to show. And this report can be different for each role who access the table. And of course, this now includes instant filtering and searching as well. In the previous version, only the app home page was customizable and instant search and filtering didn’t exist.

Again, thanks for your input. Please be assured that the QuickBase team is listening.

Thanks for your feedback; we always appreciate it. We have a ‘What’s New and Changed’ visual guide to help your users navigate the NEW QuickBase. As you settle in to the new interface, we hope that you’ll find that the changes save you time in your day-to-day. Here’s the document, and we look forward to any additional feedback. http://quickbase.intuit.com/downloads/whats_new_and_changed.pdf